Constitutional scepticism

In our usual slacker style we’re a day late with this, but I thought we should do our small part to publicise the Stop Watching Us petition, which calls on the US Government to respect the Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition of unreasonable surveillance.

I haven’t actually signed it myself, partly because I’m not convinced it will achieve anything other than providing the authorities with a handy list of self-identified subversives, but mainly because I’m a hard-core communist who views with disdain the naive liberal notion that the constitution of a bourgeois republic is anything other than a fig-leaf of legality designed to distract us from the reality of capitalist power relations. As of this morning there were 552,411 people with a more optimistic view of citizens’ rights under constitutional government though, so if, like them, you are less cynical than I, you should probably sign up.